Another case. Note comment about brakes during WOT.
A. The Accident
Jarvis testified at trial that, in 1991, she started her six-day-old Ford Aerostar in the driveway of her home in rural Woodstock, New York with her right foot "lightly on the brake." After she turned on the ignition, the engine suddenly revved and the vehicle "took off." As the van accelerated, [*39] Jarvis pumped the [**5] brake with both feet, looking down to make sure her feet were on the brake pedal. The van would not stop. She steered to avoid people walking in the road and then heard saplings brushing against the side of the van before she blacked out. Jarvis testified that she had driven many different kinds of vehicles over the twenty-four years since she had first acquired a driver's license, and that, prior to this incident, she had never had a driving accident.
Jarvis's father, who was standing nearby, testified that he saw the car starting off at an "unusually fast speed" for his daughter. As the Aerostar passed him, he saw Jarvis "holding on to the steering wheel very tight and her body was going back and forth ever so slightly." Jarvis's father testified that as Jarvis was removed from the van after the accident, she screamed, "there's something wrong. The brakes don't work. There's something wrong with that car. The brakes don't work." As a result of the accident, Jarvis sustained a traumatic head injury and could not return to her previous employment.
Plaintiff's reconstruction expert, George Pope, testified that the van traveled approximately 330 feet and did some braking that slowed [**6] it to 15 to 20 miles per hour before it entered a ditch and turned over. Pope testified that the Aerostar had vacuum power brakes that draw their vacuum from the engine, but that the engine does not create the necessary vacuum when accelerating full throttle. Even though a check valve traps a reservoir of vacuum for use when the engine vacuum is low, this reserve can be depleted after one-and-a-half hard brake applications. Therefore, according to Pope, if Jarvis were pumping the brakes in an effort to stop the Aerostar after it began accelerating at full throttle, she would lose approximately one thousand pounds of additional force that the booster normally could supply to her brakes. Pope concluded that "under those circumstances []it will feel to a person like they've lost their brakes, [because] they're pushing and nothing is happening."
Joanne Valentine-Simonian, a passerby, testified that she watched Jarvis's van pass and that she saw the van moving quickly down the road and ran toward the woods. As she looked back to see the van pass, she did not see any brake lights. A police officer who was called to the scene of the accident testified that he saw no marks on the road [**7] near the accident except in the ditch where the Aerostar turned over. Jarvis's father had been the last one to use the Aerostar before the accident. When asked at trial whether he had left the parking brake on, Jarvis's father testified that it was his "normal habit" to put it on, but that he had "no memory of it as such" in this case. When asked directly, he answered, "I'm not certain I put it in with the parking brake on." Pope testified that the Aerostar has two instrument panel lights related to the braking system. When the parking brake is left on, a red light is illuminated on the right side of the dash below the horizontal center point. A second light, amber in color and located on the upper left corner of the dash panel, is related to the rear anti-lock brake system and will illuminate for two seconds after the ignition is turned on and the van moves forward while the system reviews its components to ensure that they are fucntioning properly. Jarvis testified that she saw one white or light yellow light illuminated high on the dashboard toward the left and that, "as I'm recalling[,] it said brake." Asked specifically if s
